Hut site, Srón An Locháin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Srón An Locháin, Co. Kerry

On the south-west-facing slopes of Colly East Mountain in Kerry, someone once cut into a hillside and built a tiny circular shelter, two metres across, with walls of dry-stacked stone.

That act of shaping the ground, levelling the interior by raising the lower side and cutting back into the slope on the upper side, suggests a practical intelligence at work, though whose intelligence, and when, the landscape does not readily say.

The hut sits in rough hill pasture at a natural break in the rocky slope of Colly East Mountain, in the area known as Srón An Locháin. Its drystone walls, built without mortar by laying shaped or gathered stones in careful courses, have collapsed to a height of about half a metre and a thickness of roughly sixty centimetres. A single large boulder was incorporated into the north-west section of the wall, probably because moving it would have been more trouble than working around it. Rubble now fills and surrounds the interior. What makes the site quietly interesting is not just the hut itself but the fact that another, near-identical structure stands approximately ten metres to the south-west, suggesting this was not an isolated impulse but part of some organised use of the mountain ground, whether for seasonal grazing, shelter for a herdsman, or something else entirely. Small circular drystone huts of this kind appear across upland Ireland in various periods, and without excavation it is difficult to assign a confident date to any individual example.

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